In a dynamical system, such as one finds in classical mechanics, the current state of the system uniquely determines the whole future trajectory. (This basically defines the concept of "state".) Markov models are the natural generalization of dynamical systems to situations where strict determinism does not apply; rather than the current state fixing the whole future trajectory, it fixes the distribution over future trajectories. Rather than having a perfect, idealized machine, one has a machine with some internal noise and fluctuations.
Hidden Markov models are one natural way of generalizing Markov models to situations where direct measurement of the state is not possible: the current state is enough to fix the distribution of observations, but observations have no real effect on states. (There are other ways to handle imperfect measurement.) Trying to understand a hidden Markov model from its observed time series is like trying to figure out the workings of a noisy machine from looking at the shadows its moving parts cast on a wall, with the proviso that the shadows are cast by a randomly-flickering candle.
Reverse-engineering by candle-light is, of course, much closer to our usual situation in dealing with nature than is ideal mechanics, and HMMs are an extremely useful class of model for real data. Unfortunately, a lot of the presentations of the theory for HMMs tend to be pretty arcane. This book provides a readable and practical introduction to HMMs and their basic algorithms suitable for anyone with a basic grasp of linear algebra, dynamics, and probability. I would expect that final-year undergraduates in physics, engineering, math, etc., should be able to profit from it. Statistics and machine learning students may in fact have a harder time with it, because of their lack of familiarity with dynamics and differential equations. (I should be able to test that guess by the end of the spring semester.)
Chapter 1 introduces HMMs as models of dynamics, including running examples based on the Lorenz equation and an actual laser system which closely approximates it. Chapter 2 derives the basic algorithms for discrete-state, discrete-observation, discrete-time HMMs: the forward algorithm for calculating the probability of an observation sequence; the backward algorithm for calculating the probability of a state sequence; the Viterbi algorithm for finding the most likely state sequence; and the Baum-Welch/forward-backward/expectation-maximization algorithm for maximum-likleihood parameter estimation, including a nicely physical discussion of why EM converges. Chapter 3 looks at some extensions to the basic model and the corresponding changes in algorithms, while chapter 4 goes to continuous-state, continuous-observation HMMs, a.k.a. "state-space models", and derives the Kalman filter for linear, Gaussian HMMs. It also touches on the more complicated methods needed for fully nonlinear, non-Gaussian processes.
Professionals will not of course learn much from the first four chapters, but should still look at chapter 5, which contains natural, but so far as I know novel, observations linking bounds on the likelihood to the Lyapunov exponents of dynamical systems.
Chapter 6 is an example of using HMMs to do classification on real physiological time series ("is the patient breathing or not?"), which brings out the need to modify the basic algorithms for this sort of task. I suspect this will be pedagogically very useful, since students are much too apt to think of standard algorithms as terminals rather than starting-points, and it'll do them good to see how to re-work them.
The one draw-back from using this book in the classroom is that instructors would have to make up their own problem sets. However, all the code is available (in Python), so the lazy teacher could just assign students to reproduce the examples in the text.
Disclaimer: Andy is an acquaintance, and he was kind enough to let me read an earlier draft a few years ago, and to send me a copy now. However, I have no stake in the success of this book.
xii+132 pp., bibliography, many line and color figures, index
In print as a paperback, ISBN 978-0-898716-65-8, US$55 [Buy from Powell's]